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Pegasus Librarian Posts

It’s All a Head Game

Published by Iris on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

I’m still laboring over my silly little 15-20 minute presentation. I’m VERY pleased that last week I collected detailed screen shots of everything I wanted to show because now one of the catalogs I was going to use as an example is off line! (I was originally inspired to go the full screen shot route rather than live demo because of a couple of spectacular failures I saw recently at another conference.)

Luckily, after Thursday morning I won’t have to slog away at this any more. It’s all a head game, I know. If I hadn’t been surprised to see my name listed as one of the two-person KEYNOTE panel at the conference (when I’d thought it was just any old panel discussion) I’d have finished the stupid thing by now. What I’d give for a brain transplant some days. All I want is to be brilliant, confident, and witty, and I suppose charming wouldn’t be a bad idea either… Is that too much to ask?

What a way to enter into the conference presentation arena… I’ve never presented at an event before.

On a happier note, my mom and dad and wonderful, huge, 100-pound dog are going to be arriving any second now, and they’re staying until Sunday. I just hope the dog and the cat can make peace by then, though that’s doubtful. I can see it all now: after two days of them going after each other my neighbors will collectively petition to have me evicted.

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It’s a … CMS! (Isn’t it cute…)

Published by Iris on Monday, May 29th, 2006

After two years of deliberations, testing, talking, and not a little hair-pulling, my campus has finally decided to adopt Moodle rather than Sakai. This decision, which was made just about 20 minutes ago, is the culmination of weekly meetings for the last 10 weeks. I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours in the last couple of months sifting through surveys, usability studies, and pedagogical issues, and I can say with full sincerity that I’m very pleased with our decision. Sakai has so much potential but is just not as polished as Moodle.

I’m flying pretty high right now. It’s going to be quite a job to keep my concentration going today (yes, I am at work because my college doesn’t take today off), but I’ve got to just grit my teeth and do it. My presentation won’t organize itself…

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A Fine Old Brouhaha

Published by Iris on Saturday, May 27th, 2006

You know you’ve ruffled some feathers when a single blog post gets 200 comments (some of them quite vulgar) in one day, and it’s follow-up post already has more than 50 comments (again, many of them are quite vulgar). It all started when O’Reilly Media sent a cease and desist letter to IT@Cork because the IT@Cork was planning to put on a conference called the “Web 2.0 Half-Day Conference” and (apparently) O’Reilly has applied for a service mark (both here and in the UK) that prohibits anyone other than O’Reilly to have a live conference or event that has the words “Web 2.0” in the title.

Others have noted that O’Reilly wasn’t the first to use the term, so he doesn’t really have a claim to it.

Michael Casey has assured everyone that, whether you love it or hate it, the “Library 2.0” term is in the public domain.

It’s kind of funny because just the day before this whole thing blew up, a co-worker and I were talking about the Library 2.0 concept and name. She expressed concern that whenever someone puts a new and catchy name onto something that we’ve already been doing you have to worry what they’re selling you. This turned out to be so true with the Web version of the name!

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All the Fascinating Blogs

Published by Iris on Friday, May 26th, 2006

The more I read, the more cool blogs I find. This is GREAT! It’s like being at a conference every day all day. (BTW, see Meredith’s awesome post on online education for librarians. This IS a great time to be a librarian.) So here’s what’s new to me recently.

There are lots more on my bloglines account. And to all you bloggers out there that I learn from every day, thanks. I’m having the time of my life learning about my profession from people who are so engaged and passionate about their work.

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